Did you know that 46% of small businesses don’t have a website? This means almost half of small businesses aren’t utilizing an effective digital marketing strategy.
In order to develop a digital presence, it’s integral you have a digital marketing strategy.
But what are the first steps of digital marketing? Start with a campaign. A digital marketing campaign encompasses a host of actions that help to increase conversions, engagement, revenue, and/or traffic.
You create your campaign based on your goals, budget, and resources.
How do you build a digital marketing campaign? Follow these results to create a digital marketing strategy that yields results.
Step 1: Know Your Goals
Every marketer has different goals. Maybe your goal is to rank higher in search engines. Maybe your goal is to gain more social media followers. Some marketers have specific outcome goals, such as more sales.
Knowing your goals, whether short-term or long-term, is the first step in every successful marketing campaign. This ensures you’ll get the most out of your campaign and can develop strategies based on your goals.
Step 2: Know Your Audience
Every business has a niche. The audience in this niche expects your brand to have a specific online presence. This includes releasing a specific type of content, using industry-terms, and overall having a certain image or branding.
This is why you should know your audience before starting your marketing campaign.
Many businesses in a niche have a good understanding of their audience. What if you’re unsure? There are key ways to identify your audience.
First, start with basic metrics. Look at location, gender, language, and age.
From here, look at more specific metrics. This includes purchase history, most popular pages and products, and website interactions.
An easy way to know your customers better is by creating personas. A persona is a fictional person meant to represent one or more group(s) of your customers.
The goal is to describe this fictional person in detail. Give them a name, their income, their career, age, family, and even likes and dislikes. You should also tie all of these features into your business — what attracts them to your company?
Step 3: Create a Budget
On average, businesses spend between one and two percent of their annual sales revenue on marketing. This doesn’t seem like a lot, but the costs can add up. You also want to make a good ROI on your marketing campaign.
This is why all marketers need to create a budget and pay attention to this budget throughout the campaign.
Digital marketing has many strategies. Maybe organic strategies such as SEO are free.
But you’ll want to hire or outsource a content creator, possibly an SEO expert, and invest in many SEO tools. In addition, advertising is also a common digital marketing strategy, and the prices can add up if you’re not careful.
This leads us to our next point.
Step 4: Choose Your Digital Marketing Channels Wisely
As mentioned in our last section, there are many strategies involved in digital marketing. But do you need all of them? It depends on your goals. Different campaigns call for different strategies, or at least emphasis on specific strategies.
Take a look at your goals and all of the digital marketing channels. Decide which ones will benefit your campaign, if not all of them.
Still not sure which channels will benefit you? You can start by investing a little bit in all of them. If you’re gaining more success in one channel than the others, focus on that channel.
You can also take a look at what your competitors are doing.
Are they focusing more on email marketing? Put your eggs in that basket. What if they’re successful on social media? Make social media the core component of your strategy.
Step 5: Know the Tools and Strategies for Each Channel
When you decide which channels you’re focusing on, it’s time to dive deep into those channels. This includes individualistic research, gaining access to specific tools, and knowing the right strategies.
Let’s take keyword research as an example. Keywords are terms searched in Google. The right keywords will help improve your search engine performance. This is a core strategy in both SEO and PPC.
How do you find the right keywords? Start by investing in keyword research tools. These tools show vital information that determines the keyword’s success.
Part of knowing the best keywords entails knowing how to read this information.
For example, you’ll want to invest in keywords with high search traffic. But that’s not all. You also want a keyword with low difficulty and low competition, to ensure search engines aren’t oversaturated with these keywords.
Step 6: Combine Customer Satisfaction with Marketing
There are many ways your customers can communicate with your business.
The classic communication methods include face-to-face, phone, and email. While these methods are still used, it’s best to diversify your customer communication strategy.
This is why customer service is as important to marketing as it is to every other aspect of your business. Offering different customer communication channels helps build trust in your organization.
Fortunately, there are ways you can combine these two strategies.
Always offer the latest communication methods. Chatbots are a good example. Monitor your social media pages, your review pages, and even the comments section on your website to answer any questions.
Step 7: Don’t Be Afraid to Invest in Automation
Humans can’t handle every aspect of their marketing campaign. This is when automation can come in.
Automation can help track certain metrics and behaviors that improve your marketing strategy. Automation can also help streamline different duties, helping improve your campaign results.
You can incorporate automation into different marketing functions. This includes but is not limited to advertising, social media, and email marketing.
Need Help with Your Digital Marketing Campaign?
After reading this article, you understand a lot goes into a digital marketing campaign.
You can alleviate these stresses by contacting an experienced digital marketing firm. A professional marketer will ensure your business will see digital marketing results.
Our online services vary from SEO all the way to reputation management. Schedule an appointment with us today.
